December, 2006

Just read this over on FeedTheBull and I hope it's true as it will help shift us (the collective society, not Microsoft) to where we ought to be with in car computing. Not that I'm saying everyone needs this but when you spend a few hours of your day on the M4 often stationary, there could be some benefits. Whilst Exchange's Outlook Voice Access doesn't require any specific integration as it works right now, it would be great to be able to have things like my Zune device integrated. Lots of potential here and even more when Ford and others start connecting this up to their dealer networks and roadside services for much better service experiences. I know many people will think this is just too much technology and a potential safety risk but I'm on the other side of things - I think this has massive potential for integration with web services like mapping, traffic, car repair, tyre companies etc etc. I can see it now...tyres need changing (like mine did recently), car connects to Kelkoo or something like that, finds the cheapest tyres and someone who has them in stock and then maps this on to your in car LCD using Virtual Earth. Lots of potential business models there too. Hmmm

Where else, the Apple store on 5th avenue. I'm not sure how many people need an iSteve fix at 3am in the morning and don't plan to find out but I'm prepared to bet the place is still jammed full of people reading their Hotmail and GMail like they were in Soho yesterday!

As always Eileen finds cool stuff on Exchange and other MS products. Here she links to a series of articles on our internal deployment of Exchange 2007 and I found the one on our shift to an entirely 64bit based deployment the most interesting in terms of what it gives us. As you probably know, Exchange 2007 is 64 bit only and this is a great article for those of us (i.e. me) who need a quick primer on this.

Short story: this is saving us $5m per year!

Favourite line: The 64-bit platform supports eight Terabytes of user-mode memory and another eight Terabytes of kernel-mode memory. These memory limits practically eliminate all issues related to virtual memory fragmentation or shortage of kernel resources. With such high memory limits, a 64-bit Exchange server has a large pool of system resources available to handle theoretically a very large number of concurrent client connections

Interesting Stats: Over 13m Internet submitted emails per day with over 10.5m blocked submissions

Well I'm off to NYC for a few days to enjoy the Big Apple at New Year. It's a place I'm pretty familiar with but haven't been for a few years so I'm pretty excited about going back and visiting so usual haunts and some new ones. I'm keen to see the new Paul Smith shop on Greene Street that a friend worked on, the new Apple cube and MOMA.

The main question is where should I spend New Year's Eve? I've done the Times Square thing and a few other places over the years but this time I'm looking for something a bit more chilled with good beer and good food though nothing too formal. Hugh suggested a few places: